Debate Bump for McCain?
by WonkoSteve
Today’s Arizona Republic carried a front-page article about John McCain and his debate performance last week. According to the article he “wowed critics with a powerful performance. …Suddenly, the Arizona Republican is basking in some momentum for the first time in a long time.” For the first time in two months, to be exact, when our archival data for early July show him with a 60% buzz share. This made me wonder: Did McCain’s debate performance give him any momentum in the Wonkosphere?
Here is a long-range graph of McCain’s buzz in the liberal and conservative spheres:
In the two days immediately following the debate his share actually fell about 5%, but since then it does seem to be on the way back up. On the other hand, the swing down and up is well within the range of variation over the last three weeks. So it’s hard to tell whether this represents a lasting change or just normal churn in the numbers. Perhaps the good news in this graph is that, compared to early August, buzz about McCain has recovered somewhat in recent weeks.
Since the buzz numbers are inconclusive, here are some other questions about McCain’s WonkoNumbers, and associated answers.
Q: Are there more mentions of McCain after the debate than before the debate?
A: Yes, a lot. In the five days before the debate we logged 389 posts that mentioned McCain. In the five days since then, we have logged 871 posts that mention him. On the other hand, as the graph above shows, his buzz share (which takes into account the significance of talk about him compared to all the other candidates) did not double, indicating that a lot of these mentions are just that–mentions.
Q: Are McCain’s tone numbers any higher after the debate than before the debate?
A: No. The average tone of McCain posts in the five days before the debate was .0955, and in the five days after it was .1037. That’s an increase of .0082, but it’s not statistically significant–in other words it’s a difference we might expect just given the general variability of his tone numbers over those periods.
Q: Are a lot of the posts about McCain since the debate about the debate?
A: To answer this question I determined the percentage of posts since 9/5 mentioning the Republican candidates that also contained the word “debate.” Here are the results:
McCain is in the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of posts mentioning him that also mention the debates. For comparison, there is a very similar percentage for Thompson, and he didn’t even debate! The highest percentages were for the lowest-buzz candidates overall, indicating that the debates gave people something to say about them.
Q: Since the debate, have McCains’s posts that mention the debate been more positive than ones that don’t?
A: Yes. For posts mentioning McCain since 9/5, the average tone of the posts that mention the debate was .1088, whereas the tone of posts that didn’t mention the debate was .0963. Unlike the before/after comparison above, the difference of .0125 (one and a quarter percent) was statistically significant, meaning it was greater than what we’d expect given normal variability in his tone numbers. Whether this is good for McCain is hard to say. It suggests that people are more positive about his debate performance, but less positive about other matters.
So overall, it’s not clear that the Wonkosphere is as impressed with McCain’s debate performance as the critics in mentioned in today’s Arizona Republic story. Or at least if it is, the rosy glow is not doing much yet for his general buzz and tone numbers.
